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Wednesday, February 5, 2014

These Birds Walk (February 8th and 9th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THESE
BIRDS WALK screens Saturday
February 8th at 9:30 pm and Sunday February 9th at 6:30 pm at the
Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review
by Bob Ignizio

The
Edhi Foundation is the largest welfare organization in Pakistan,
providing numerous services to the country's poor. The documentary
film THESE BIRDS WALK
focuses primary on the Foundation's efforts to care for children in
need: those who have been abandoned, orphaned, or who have run away
from home. With regards to the runaways, there is an effort made to
find out where they live and return them home in the Foundation
ambulance. The same vehicle is also used for the another service we
see the Foundation provide in the film: the delivery of corpses to
their family members.

As we
see, it's not always easy knowing whether the runaways should
be returned to their families.
There is no social worker to investigate conditions at home, and when
one boy tells the Edhi Foundation ambulance driver taking him back
home that his parents will beat him, the best the driver can do is
promise to tell the parents not to hit their child. Yeah, that always
works. Thankfully not all the stories in THESE BIRDS WALK
end on such a downbeat note.

THESE BIRDS WALK
is shot in a cinema veritéstyle, but with a
sharply focused narrative. There's a certain amount of meandering and
just sitting back and letting the subjects be themselves, at least as
much as anyone can be when they're being followed around by a camera
crew. But for the most part there's a real dramatic momentum to the
film, with a few shots (notably one of the boys running into a
shrine) feeling almost like something out of a scripted film. It
makes for an engaging film, but coupled with the short running time
(an hour and 12 minutes), it also makes for a film that feels a bit
light on information. 3 out of 4 stars.